The Jacquard loom

At the beginning of human civilisation the brain was not recognised as the centre of our intelligence. It was Galen, one of the leading physicians of the Roman empire during the second century, who wrote an essay where he speculated that the brain was the centre of cognition and willed action, one of the first people to recognise its importance. On its quest to develop intelligent machines, humanity developed many examples of machines that could perform basic numerical calculations, like the Pascaline, a machine created by Blaise Pascal that, using a system of gears and wheels, could add and subtract numbers. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and a philosopher, whose conception of human existence was that of an unstable reality in which we live in continuous contradictions, moral, human and even physical, in between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Born at the beginning of the XVII century, he lived in a period that had not yet known the enlightment.